Tourism Management, Marketing, and Development

Tourism has experienced continued expansion and diversification over the last six decades, becoming one of the largest and fastest-growing sectors in the global economy, according to the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO, 2012). In spite of sporadic shocks, international tourist arrivals have recorded a virtually uninterrupted increase: from 277 million in 1980 to 1,138 million in 2014. The UNWTO estimates that international arrivals worldwide are expected to reach nearly 1.8 billion by the year 2030 (Tourism Towards 2030), resulting from an increase of 3.3 percent a year on average from 2010 to 2030. This shows how crucial the potential impact of tourism on individual destinations and companies is expected to be in the forthcoming years.

There is a consensus among authors and researchers regarding the importance of the tourism destination image (TDI), since it affects an individual’s subjective perception and behavior as well as destination choice (Ashworth and Goodall, 1990; Bigne et al., 2001; Chon, 1991, 1992; Echtner and Ritchie, 1993; Mansfeld, 1992; Stabler, 1988; Telisman-Kosuta, 1989). Destination image has become a very important issue in tourism marketing research, since many countries use promotion and global marketing to support their image and to compete with other destinations (Kamenidou et al… 2009).

Providing visitors with a unique combination of climate, sea, and culture, the Mediterranean region is an attractive destination for tourists from around the world. As such, it is reasonable that “tourism has become a crucial export sector in the Mediterranean, responsible for the generation of jobs as well as income” (Falzon, 2012: 1080).

The narrative of Africa as a primitive, underdeveloped continent with bleak future prospects (Washington, 2011) has been increasingly modified in favor of optimistic sentiments (Blaser, 2013; Berman and Blade, 2013; Gobry, 2014). Commentators increasingly portrayAfrica as a continent of business opportunities (Mahajan, 2009). “We are tired of being the subject of everybody’s charity and care … There’s a huge market out there, and people don’t know about it” (Okonjo-Iweala, 2007, 20:13).

In recent years there has been a significant growth of interest in regional gastronomic brands. In this chapter the authors analyze the structure, content, and individual characteristics of the gastronomic industry as a key component of regional tourism. The apparent interest in the gastronomic component stems from tourists’ desire to obtain a deeper understanding of the specificities of the area they are visiting and their wish to diversify and intensify the impressions garnered on their trips.

The debate on the relationships among firm performance, heterogeneity, and agglomeration began many decades ago. Since the work of Penrose (1958), firm heterogeneity in resources and competences has been employed to explain the achievement of different levels of profitability. Wernerfelt (1984) demonstrates that the partial interfirm mobility of the different resources and capabilities are central in explaining the maintenance of competitive advantages. Moreover, the relationship between agglomeration (localization and urbanization) and productivity has spurred a vast amount of research (Rosenthal and Strange, 2004), thus providing extensive evidence of increasing returns to urban density and industry size for manufacturing industries. Focusing on different manufacturing sectors, the Italian Office of Statistics (ISTAT) has recently evidenced strongly heterogeneous dynamics in firm productivity, especially among firms belonging to different spatial clusters (ISTAT, 2014).

We acknowledge the helpful comments of all the participants of the Consumer Behavior in Tourism Symposium 2013 (CBTS, 2013) held in Bruneck (South Tyrol), Italy, and of the second EIASM Conference on Tourism Management and Tourism Related Issues, held in Nice, France. This chapter is the result of a research project discussed and shared by the authors as organic work. Only to highlight the contribution, this is referred as follows: section 1 to Marco Fazzini, section 2 to Giovanni Liberatore, sections 3 and 4 to Lorenzo Dal Maso, while section 5 is a common part.

The new institutional economics (NIE) developed in 1960s and 1970s as a continuation of traditional institutionalism at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Its representatives are, among others: Williamson (1981), Jensen and Meckling (1976), Fama and Jensen (1983), and North and Thomas (1973, 1995). The approach adopted by NIE is different from neoclassical economics (Pejovich, 1999; Williamson, 1981), according to which entities when making a decision follow a utility maximizationpolicy. In this orthodox thinking represented by neoclassical economics, factors such as mentality, habits, and value systems of the entities do not matter. On the contrary, according to NIE many noneconomic determinants influence entities’ behavior. In this approach, an entity and its rationality are embedded in their social, historical, and cultural contexts. Contexts are created by formal institutions (i.e., different types of legal rules) and informal ones (such as values, traditions, customs, habits, culture, morality, and so on) rooted in the cultural heritage of a particular community. Representatives of NIE stress that formal institutions exist and operate within informal ones, being a historical heritage of a particular nation.

In today’s economy, companies and organizations are more and more interested in staging memorable experiences for their customers rather than merely delivering services (Pine and Gilmore, 1998). This trend is even more evident when it comes to the travel and tourism industry (Aho, 2001; Chhetri et al., 2004; Cho et al., 2002; Coghlan et al., 2012; Fairweather and Swaffield, 2001; Han and Back, 2007; Jewell and Crotts, 2001; Kim and Jamal, 2007; McIntyre, 2007; Quadri-Felitti and Fiore, 2013; Ritchie and Hudson, 2009; Snepenger et al., 2004; Trauer and Ryan, 2005; Wang, 1999).

Tourism includes a wide range of economic activities that depend on, and have an important impact on, the natural environment and on the local populations in tourist destinations. Overall, tourism product quality includes environmental features, in particular, tourist destinations, accommodation, and other attractions related to the location and surrounding environment. Tourists and the tourism industry make extensive use of environmental resources (Piga, 2003). Tourists are attracted by a destination’s environmental attributes (Dixon and Hof, 1997), which are damaged by the presence of those tourists (Briassoulis, 2002; Giannoni, 2009). Since the 1990s, environmental protection and awareness have become major issues. According to the ImagePower Global Green Brands 2011 study carried out by Cohn and Wolfe, Landor Associates and Penn Schoen Berland Associates in France, 47 percent of surveyed individuals claimed to be more concerned about environmental issues than economic problems. It follows then that tourists are more aware of environmental issues and conscious of the pollution caused by mass tourism. These new concerns modify tourist’s perceptions of destinations, of accommodation brands, and of intermediaries distributing tourism products (tour operators, online and offline tourism agencies, among others). As a result, a demand for environmentally responsible products has emerged in this sector, and major tourist destinations are seeking to preserve the natural environment and their indigenous cultures, and are exploring sustainable development strategies and techniques (Hassan, 2000).

Innovation performance is generally determined by the quality of the national innovation system, represented by a network of public and private sector institutions, whose activities and mutual relations ensure the process of creation, transfer, and use of new knowledge within the country. According to Klimentovská and Karlovarský Rozvojový Institut (2010), innovation is the result of systematic interactions between the individual participants in the national innovation system and their mutual links at regional, national, and supranational levels. An important role in the innovation process is then played not only by institutions of higher education and research organizations, but also by enterprises, their suppliers, and customers. And, last but not least, the process is directly influenced by the quality of the institutions and the environment where the innovation process takes place (ERDF, 2010).

Tourism is today seen as an entrepreneurial industry where success is tightly linked to each actor’s capability to create a stable network of relationships to market a specific tourism product (Della Corte, 2009), and its operators have to constantly change the products they are marketing in order to achieve competitive advantage (Foxall, 1993; Storey, 1995).

Tourism is a sector with unique characteristics. Besides having an impact on the natural environment as a result of its activity, that is, via its infrastructures, resource consumption, and waste-generation processes, tourism actually depends on the protection of the environment’s ecological integrity to remain competitive, since its activities are conducted in places of great ecological value and the natural environment is the main source of its value creation. This means that polluting the natural environment may bring severe economical consequences for this sector (Williams and Ponsford, 2009).

Tourism drives economic prosperity and sustained development in many regions around the world. By recognizing the relevance of tourism as a socioeconomic phenomenon, this book contributes to the advancement of knowledge in the fields of tourism management, marketing, and development, with a specific emphasis on performance, strategies, and sustainability and their multiple relationships at both the company and destination levels. Regardless of the variety of cases, situations, and contexts under examination in the volume, a number of common themes have emerged and are illustrated in what follows.